Overcoming ‘small peasant mentality’: semi-proletarian struggles and working-class formation in China

The accelerating urbanization for peasant-workers and the growing labour unrest in China since the 2010s have promoted some scholars to applaud how proletarianization can lead to working-class consciousness and action. Drawing on Marxian theory of proletarianization, we question the assumptions that ‘proper proletarians’ possess more revolutionary potential than semi-proletarians, and that institutionalized collective bargaining represents a more advanced form of labour struggle. Through an ethnographic study of labour activists and workers in China, this paper investigates the dilemmas that peasant-workers have encountered in working-class formation as well as tactics for overcoming these barriers. Migrant workers’ ‘small-peasant mentality’ can be overcome not by turning them into full proletarians or relinquishing rural identity, but by educating more co-workers and getting them more experienced in collective action organization. China’s experience will provide important lessons for conceptualizing the direction and tactics of organizing informal labour for the Global South.